Background on the writers shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2011

Six writers are shortlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2011, announced today, Sunday, March 13.

Will Cohu - East West – West Coast

Will Cohu was born in 1964. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1992 he freelanced as writer, editor and journalist, mostly for the Daily Telegraph. Last year his short story, Nothing But Grass, was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. He is currently writing The Wolf Pit, a memoir of Yorkshire life, for Chatto. He is married with three children and lives in Lincolnshire.

Anthony Doerr – The Deep


Anthony Doerr was born in Cleveland, USA in 1973. A short story writer and novelist, his most recent book is Memory Wall. Doerr has won three O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. Doerr also writes the “On Science” column for the Boston Globe. He currently lives in Boise, Idaho.

Roshi Fernando – The Fluorescent Jacket

Roshi Fernando was born in 1966 and brought up in south east London. Her composite novel, Homesick – which won the 2009 Impress Prize for New Writers – was published in autumn 2010 by Impress books. Her story Three Cuts was published in the anthology Sing Sorrow Sorrow by Seren, in October 2010. Fernando worked in the City for legal firms for 10 years, but became a full-time writer in 2005. She is in the final year of a PhD at Swansea University and lives in Gloucestershire with her partner and four children.

Yiyun Li – The Science of Flight

Born in November 1972, Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China, and moved to the Unites States in 1996. She is the recipient of several prizes for her writing, including the Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and an MFA from The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Li's stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and elsewhere, and her first novel, The Vagrants, was published in 2009. She lives in California with her husband and their two sons.

Hilary Mantel – Comma

Hilary Mantel CBE was born in Glossop, Derbyshire in 1952. After studying law, she was employed as a social worker then lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, returning to Britain in the 1980s. Her novel Wolf Hall (2009) won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award and 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2006 she was awarded a CBE.


Gerard Woodward – The Family Whistle

Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961 and studied art and anthropology. He has published four poetry collections, including We Were Pedestrians (2005), which was shortlisted for the 2005 TS Eliot Prize. A regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph, his 2004 novel I'll Go To Bed At Noon was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Woodward lives in Bath, where he is professor of fiction at Bath Spa University and director of its Contemporary Writing Centre.